Slowly We Rot

by Bryan Smith

  “I’m absolutely sure. Now go.”

  Noah started the Pontiac and pulled away from the curb. He suggested Luke call his brother to let him know he could go back to bed. The suggestion made Luke laugh. Turned out Luke didn’t have a brother. The whole thing had been a bluff. Noah couldn’t help it. He laughed, too. “You crazy fucker.”

  As they neared the street where Luke lived, Noah noted a convenience store coming up on their right. It was a 24-hour store. The lot was empty, except for the clerk’s car.

  “Pull in there.”

  Noah looked at Luke. “Why? We’re almost back.”

  Luke grinned and showed Noah his phone, which displayed a time of 2:51 a.m. “Ten minutes before they stop selling beer.”

  The idea was nothing short of completely insane after what they’d been through that night.

  Noah pulled into the store’s parking lot. A few minutes later, they had a fresh case of Bud. They then made their way back to Luke’s place. Luke put on some cheesy horror movie and they drank for an indeterminate time. Things got blurry and Noah eventually passed out on Luke’s couch.

  He came to hours later, sitting up with a groan and blinking blearily at the clock on Luke’s cable box. The time was just shy of ten in the morning. Luke was nowhere in sight. Noah’s mouth was sandpaper dry. He got up from the couch and stumbled into the apartment’s little kitchen. He took a tall plastic glass from a cupboard and filled it with water. He drank it down fast and followed it with another full glass. After that he went off in search of a bathroom.

  The bathroom was at the end of a short hallway. Luke’s bedroom was through an open door to the left. Noah glanced in and saw Luke sprawled out on a bed. A rancid smell was coming from the room. Luke had pissed himself. As hammered as he was, this wasn’t surprising. Noah proceeded on to the bathroom and took a long piss. On the way back, he glanced through the bedroom door again and paused in the hallway, frowning as he detected another foul odor.

  Apparently, Luke had also shit himself.

  Alarm bells went off in Noah’s head. The longer he stood there and stared at Luke, the more it seemed to him that his drinking partner from last night wasn’t moving. Like, at all. He was also lying flat on his back. An intense sense of dread rose up in Noah as he entered the bedroom. Checking on Luke was the last thing he wanted to do. He felt like utter garbage and just wanted to get back to the couch and lie down a while longer.

  But something wouldn’t let him turn away from this.

  He stood at the edge of the bed and stared down at Luke’s slack features. His eyes and mouth were wide open. He wasn’t breathing and his body was utterly still. There was a froth of yellow vomit around his mouth. More of it was on his chest. Still more stained the rumpled bed sheet beneath him.

  He was dead. No doubt about it. And had been for a while. Calling 911 wouldn’t do any good. He was hours beyond the help of paramedics. Noah stood there a long time. He was in a kind of shock at first. He’d never seen a dead person before. It was unsettling. Eventually, though, this feeling passed and it hit him that this tragic accident need not impact his life beyond this morning.

  Noah had never been here before yesterday. No one in Luke’s life knew who he was. A reflexive disgust at this notion came and went. He had a moment of feeling like a monster for even considering what was in his head. But then he began to think of it from a practical, unemotional viewpoint. It would be so easy to just walk away from this and pretend it had never happened. His life would be so much less complicated.

  Noah returned to Luke’s bathroom to take a hot shower and scrub away the filth of the night. The shower was a long one. In an effort to purge the toxins still polluting his bloodstream, he stood under the water stream until it turned lukewarm. He emerged a half hour later feeling moderately refreshed. And, more importantly, no longer resembling a person coming off the tail end of a bender.

  He walked out of there and never looked back.

  33.

  The scream lodged in Noah’s throat finally escaped, a ringing blast of denial and terror that brought a stampede of footsteps from the kitchen. He heard voices calling to him, but the roaring in his ears rendered these sounds indistinct. In desperation, he started doing chest compressions, thumping hard enough to crack bones brittle from long months of abuse. He did this even though a distant part of him knew Linda was beyond help.

  He screamed again when someone grabbed him by an arm and pulled him off the bed. That someone was Nick, who immediately began his own attempt to resuscitate Linda. Noah was furious at having been tossed aside. Linda was his responsibility. He should be the one trying to save her. But it was clear from the start that Nick was far more competent at administering CPR. Obviously he’d been trained for it at some point in his life. As he watched the ex-soldier do his thing, Noah was able to cling to a thin thread of hope. Maybe everything would be all right after all. Nick would pull off the miracle and the four of them would be able to head back to the mountain and live happily ever after, never again venturing into the sad ruins of civilization.

  But then Nick ceased doing the compressions and glanced at Noah. “I’m sorry, man. She’s gone. There’s nothing we can do.”

  Only then did Noah realize his sister was hanging onto him. Now she clutched harder at him and tried to console him in a voice thick with emotion. “I’m so sorry, Noah. It’s not fair.”

  Noah did not acknowledge this. He stood rigid for several long moments, staring at the awful sight of Linda’s utterly still form, full comprehension of what he was seeing eluding him. Something primal inside him simply refused to accept the reality of it. But then, when denial was no longer possible, another, far more dangerous feeling rose up inside him. It felt like a fire exploding outward from the center of his body, a molten rage that threatened to incinerate anything in his way.

  He tore free of his sister’s grip and gave her a hard shove away from him. She cried out in surprise as she fell to the floor. But Noah didn’t hear her, nor did he hear Nick’s thunderous rebuke. His rage kept building and building as he approached the bed with slow, deliberate steps. His hands clenched into tight fists as he stood over Linda and studied her slack features. He was shaking when he felt Nick’s hand fall on his shoulder.

  The big man said something. It didn’t register.

  Noah’s head turned slowly toward him. He glanced at the hand on his shoulder before glaring at Nick. “Get your hand off me.”

  Nick’s expression was sympathetic but wary. “You need to take a deep breath and count to ten. I know you want to blow up and I understand that. But save that for later. Right now I need you to leave the room and let me take care of business.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Aubrey was at his side again. He hadn’t heard her getting back to her feet. His rage left little room for awareness of anything else. She touched him again, but more gently this time. “Noah. Please. You know what he has to do.”

  Noah’s face twisted in confusion. For a moment, he was sure these two were talking pure nonsense. They had lost their minds. Either that or their inexplicable comments were a product of yet another ham-fisted attempt to console him. But then a moment of awareness penetrated his rage.

  He sighed. “Fuck.”

  Nick grimaced. “It has to be done. You know that. I’m trying to help here. Leave the room and let me do this for you.”

  He shook his head. “They don’t always come back.”

  This was true. Sometimes the freshly dead did not reanimate. But often they did and the reason why was a mystery. No one had ever figured it out, at least not to Noah’s knowledge. Mostly the virus spread through zombie bite. That was pretty straightforward and easy to understand. Infection resulted in death and instant reanimation. The cases of delayed reanimation in persons who had not been bitten complicated things for plague researchers. It happened about fifty percent of the time. These cases hinted at a secondary means of transmission, one in which the vir
us remained dormant until after death. It was just one of many reasons no cure was ever found.

  Nick nodded. “You’re right. Sometimes they don’t. But this needs doing as a precaution.”

  Noah was shaking his head with his eyes squeezed shut when he felt a hand clamp tight around his wrist. He gasped in shock and opened his eyes in time to see Linda’s wide-open mouth arcing toward his forearm. Her eyes had that glassy look common to all the freshly risen dead, devoid of any lingering trace of humanity. The only emotion evident in the sharp twist of her features was that raw need they all had.

  The shock of the moment almost doomed him. He was saved at just about the last possible millisecond when Nick slapped one of his big hands around the zombie’s throat and stopped it cold. The thing that had been Linda growled and snapped at Noah’s arm, its teeth nearly coming within grazing distance of his flesh. The margin narrowed again when the zombie gave its head another hard twist and tried propelling itself off the bed.

  Like all the freshly risen, this creature was possessed of unnatural strength and speed. These amped-up attributes normally faded within about a week, after which the dead things became the shamblers they’d encountered on the road. For that one week, though, they were nigh-unstoppable killing machines.

  Noah tried jerking his wrist free of the creature’s grip, but to no avail. It twisted its head again, growling more loudly this time. Noah pulled harder, managing to move his arm just the slightest fraction of an inch, which was just far enough to avoid another snap of teeth. In his peripheral vision, Noah glimpsed his sister running out of the room. He hoped she was fetching a weapon from the kitchen, because he and Nick were both unarmed at the moment.

  Nick grabbed a handful of the zombie’s hair with his free hand and pulled its head backward. This elicited another fierce growl. The creature then got its feet planted a little better on the mattress and was finally able to overwhelm them with its enhanced strength, driving them backward so fast they were both thrown off-balance. In the process, Nick lost his grip on the thing’s throat.

  The zombie wound up atop Noah on the floor. It had lost its grip on his wrist, but now he felt its teeth on his neck. He got a forearm wedged against its throat and pushed backward, once again eluding doom by the barest of margins. The problem was he knew he didn’t have it in him to hold the thing off much longer. A separate part of him felt an immense sadness even as he fought for his life. It was so strange to look into the face of this thing and know that until a short while ago it’d belonged to a woman he’d made love to the night before. Because she was so freshly risen, there was no decomposition. Except for the savage twist of its features, this thing still looked exactly like the Linda he had known.

  Until, that is, a shadow fell over him and a big blade slammed into the zombie’s temple. The big hand gripping the knife’s handle kept it in place a moment after driving it in, Noah’s rescuer waiting until it was clear the thing was finished as a threat. The zombie’s expression was a frozen snarl. The rest of its body was just as rigid. The knife was removed. A dribble of dark blood emerged from the ugly wound to its temple.

  The body was hauled away and tossed aside. Noah was unsurprised to see Nick standing above him, knife in hand. The big man was panting and his face was flushed from the exertion.

  Noah got to his feet and saw that Aubrey was in the room again. She was staring at her brother, her eyes wide with concern and residual terror. Noah assumed she had supplied the knife Nick had used to save his life. He knew he should be nothing but grateful. These two were making a habit of pulling him out of the fire. But then he looked at Linda’s corpse and the rage that had threatened to consume him earlier began to rekindle.

  Aubrey came to him and touched his arm. “It’s not your fault.”

  Nick nodded. “The old fucker is the one to blame. The internal injuries he inflicted got her in the end. That’s all.”

  Noah laughed and said nothing.

  A wary glance passed between Nick and Aubrey.

  Aubrey squeezed his arm. “Noah--”

  Noah shook his head. “What we did last night, that’s what killed her. It was too soon. It was too much for her.”

  Nick frowned. “That’s bullshit.”

  A pained look crossed Aubrey’s face. “He’s right, Noah. You know that’s not true.”

  Noah laughed. “Oh, but it is. It’s one-hundred percent, absolutely fucking true. I fucked her to death.”

  His loudest laugh yet followed this pronouncement.

  Nick and Aubrey exchanged another troubled look, but they were at a temporary loss for words. Both seemed aware there was nothing they could say to short circuit Noah’s impending spiral into deep darkness.

  Noah bolted from the room before either of them could figure out how to deal with him. He stalked down the hallway and into the kitchen, where he tore open cupboards and rooted through their depleted contents. From one cabinet, he tossed out cans of ravioli and chicken soup, as well as an already split-open bag of flour. The bag exploded when it hit the floor, sending up a puff of flour dust. He extracted pots and pans from another cabinet and tossed these over his shoulder. The clatter these made when they struck the floor elicited shrieks of dismay from Aubrey, who’d followed him into the kitchen.

  He finally found what he was looking for behind some dusty glasses. A bit of the tension gripping him eased as he pushed the glasses aside and took out the bottle of George Dickel. The fifth of whiskey was full, the seal around the cap never having been broken. It was like a gift from God.

  Or from the devil, more likely.

  Aubrey gasped in alarm when she saw it. “Noah! No, don’t you fucking dare.”

  Noah gave the cap a hard twist, breaking the seal. He flicked the cap away, knowing he wouldn’t be needing it again. He raised the bottle to his mouth and took a deep drink. Nick intervened when Aubrey tried to tear it away from him. He pulled her out of range as Noah took another, much longer drink.

  The burn of the whiskey as it hit the back of his throat did not dampen Noah’s rage. It inflamed it. At the same time, there was a sense of relief. The darkness overtaking him was scary yet also comforting in its familiarity. He welcomed its return. It felt like coming home again.

  Aubrey shrieked and thrashed against Nick. But he held fast to her and tried to soothe her with empty words of consolation. “It’s okay. Just stop.” Like that, over and over.

  Eventually, she did wind down. Her face was shiny with tears as she begged her brother to pour out the whiskey.

  Instead he took another drink.

  Aubrey wailed pitifully, despair overtaking her.

  Nick was looking at Noah again as he addressed Aubrey. “Let him do it. He needs to.”

  Noah sneered as he headed for the back door. “You should listen to the man. He’s not as stupid as he looks.”

  Nothing else was said as he left the house, slamming the door behind him.

  34.

  Noah drank the whole bottle of George Dickel as he wandered around the abandoned neighborhood. It got him good and drunk, but this time a fifth of whiskey wasn’t nearly enough to take him into blackout territory. This likely had something to do with the overabundance of adrenaline in his system. There just wasn’t enough booze in the bottle to burn through it and take him into the realm of oblivion, which he craved even more than the alcohol itself.

  In the interest of securing more whiskey, he decided he would explore some other houses in the area. Even in his inebriated state, however, it was clear most were too decrepit to safely enter. In many cases, severe storm damage was apparent from a distance, but the severity of it was even worse upon closer inspection. The houses were obvious deathtraps.

  The oblivion Noah sought was the temporary kind. He wasn’t quite feeling suicidal. Not yet anyway. With Linda dead, his original goal was front and center again. If anything, it was more important than ever. But he couldn’t resume the journey without first administering a heavy dose of self-abuse.
/>
  The first house he found that seemed safe to enter was three streets over from where he’d spent the night. A compact car sat in the driveway, but it obviously hadn’t been operational for years. Its tires were flat and the sun had baked the red paintjob, turning it into a blotchy mess. A faded Bile Lords sticker was on the rear bumper. Noah glanced inside the car on his way up to the house and saw a six-pack of beer on the passenger seat. At first it seemed like another gift from above (or below). But when he peeled a can from the plastic ring-holder and popped the tab, he hesitated before trying it. The old beer smelled nasty. At last, he took a tentative sip and wound up gagging. It had gone bad.

  He tossed the can away and approached the house. When he found the front door locked, he went around to the back. The door there had a window. He broke it and reached inside to unlock the door. There was no whiskey in the house, but he found a bottle of cheap wine in the refrigerator, along with a lot of rotten, shriveled food. The bottle had never been opened. Nose crinkling in disgust at the refrigerator’s rancid contents, he extracted the bottle and opened it. To his surprise, the wine tasted okay. It didn’t make him want to throw up, which was good enough. He drank it as he wandered about the house. He found some badly decomposed corpses, but they were the non-animated kind.

  One of the dead people sat in a recliner in the living room. Noah plopped down on a nearby sofa and drank more wine. After a while, he started talking to the dead man (he guessed it was a man, anyway), telling his unresponsive host about what had happened to Linda and how, almost without fail, everything he touched turned to shit. He was cursed. No one could deny it.

  Noah finished the wine and slipped into unconsciousness. When he came to, it was much later in the day. Fading late afternoon sunlight filtered in through the closed blinds. It would be dark soon. This he noted only dimly, because something far more startling had seized his attention.